


Sailing the Seven Seas And Getting Home On Time For Dinner

by PineapplePrincess



Category: Little Women (1994)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Fluff, Kid Fic, Post-Canon, Romance, Snowmen, Winter, playing pirate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:53:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27613750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PineapplePrincess/pseuds/PineapplePrincess
Summary: Adventure is the natural spice for a long-term relationship.
Relationships: Theodore Laurence/Josephine March
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Sailing the Seven Seas And Getting Home On Time For Dinner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ultra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ultra/gifts).



“Avast! Ye’ve been boarded, Landlubber!” 

Laurie looked up from his fusty pile of books and about threw the accounting book across the room at the sound of his wife’s voice. “Are we pirates now?”

Jo leaned across the desk and he realized she was wearing a burnt cork beard on her chin, as well as a pair of slacks and a doublet with an old shirt. 

_“Pirates!”_ she said. Her dark eyes flashed like flint striking stone. “Watch your tongue when you speak to me! I am Grace, queen of the ocean fair! And you, merchant, will surrender your booty.”

It was then that Laurie noticed there were precisely three small shapes sneaking about in the hallway on their hands and knees, the wooden swords he’d had carved for them tucked in their jaws, making what they assumed to be the most pirate-like noises possible. _Missing one,_ Laurie thought, with mild alarm, before he felt something poking his knee.

“Hands up, land lover!” their three-year-old said from beneath the desk. At least Laurie now knew where the little boy was.

“Lubber!” Jo stage-whispered, only to get a poke from their son.

“Oh no! It’s….” Laurie trailed off, but Jo’s mischievous expression suggested she was about to be no help to him at all.

“Davy the Bonemuncher!” his son shouted.

“Davy the Bonemuncher! The most fearsome scourge of the seven seas!” Laurie made a dramatic sound of pure fear, and Davy grinned, climbing up Laurie’s thighs to poke away at him with the sword. “By jove! I’m being held prisoner!” Laure said. 

“Do you surrender?” Jo asked. 

To her? Always. But he couldn’t say that in front of the children. He grinned and told Davy that he had, which set up a cry of joy and signaled the entrance of his sisters. 

Elizabeth, Drusilla and Evelyn were all shouting, dark-haired balls of excitement, relieved to have escaped the schoolroom for the day due to snow and ice. Jo leaned over and pecked Laurie’s cheek in approval, then favored him with one of her rakish grins. “Good show, Teddy.”

“And I barely had to do anything,” he said. Standing up and twirling his eldest, Elizabeth, about to face him, he said, “Come, let’s hunt Dru and your mother now.”

“Must I be left to protect Davy?” Evelyn whined, as Davy repeatedly prodded her with the sword until she forcibly parted him from it to the tune of his angry howls.

“Well, I suppose that wouldn’t be capital.” Jo loved their son, naturally, but he was unruly, and playing pirates with him often ended in accidental injury because he was at a heedless age. Evy was five and opinionated, and thus began to shove her brother, while Dru hung back and studied the spines of the books in her father’s library and Elizabeth tried to order them about. 

“Christopher Columbus, stop assaulting one another! Now, why don’t we all hunt Master Richards?” Jo asked.

The notion made Laurie snort. The man who tutored the girls between sessions at Plumfield was often a fussy and officious type, though never cruel. His stewardship was, however, a bit old-fashioned, enough to earn him some disgruntled annoyance from Jo, who wanted to educate the children in the more modern mold they were now applying at Plumfield. They often got into long philosophical debates about language, and Laurie hung back, fascinated, loving his wife’s mind.

“I’d rather not be forced to look for another replacement this close to Christmas.” The educational variety would be good for the children, and no baby of theirs would ever have to suffer from boredom for too long. They were a bunch of scamps, and they kept their parents in constant flight at their heels.

Jo and Laurie’s lives had been happily settled since Laurie had brought Jo home from their European honeymoon, already rounding with Elizabeth. Jo’s Words flowed from her pen unstintingly over the long months of her first pregnancy, and Laurie watched her write, and then determinedly go from publisher to publisher with the baby in a carriage trying to sell her novel.

She wouldn’t use any of his connections to the publishing world (the apron strings he’d had to shed linked back to those people and places, too), but somehow found a champion. The first book was about her childhood, and had entered the world two years after passionate Elizabeth had, when Jo was pregnant with their placid Dru, who loved to read books as much as her mother loved to write them. When they yearned for adventure and made plans for life when the children were a bit older, they were contented with the small adventures Massachusetts could provide them. 

They had learned to balance work with pleasure – jobs with fun. Jo was not the sort to sit still and darn socks as much as she revered her beloved Marmee, though she did what was required of the wife of an ivy-league educated man, hosted the requisite dinners and went to the requisite plays, though they bored her and together they laughed at the nasty and cruel examples of rudeness they were occasionally confronted with. Laurie had expected that she would bristle at this domestic hemming in, however, when he chose to marry her. 

And so they made a fair trade. Jo got the whole morning to work at her stories, and as she put her words to paper Laurie would take the children visiting, or accompany them to their lessons. Jo took care of them in the afternoons, when Laurie took up the required work of his grandfather’s business (he did want to settle in Germany someday – and maybe someday his music would be heard). They also financially supported Plumfield, a school for troubled and impoverished children run out of Jo’s Aunt March’s old manse and staffed by many teachers, including Jo’s brother-in-law John. Today was a rare leisurely treat, his papers filed away, and Laurie relished it. 

“How about a snowman, then?” Jo asked. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make a couple of figures and put them in the front lawn? Scare all of those wicked lawyers who stop by?” Jo wiped her cork-covered face upon her sleeve, and she favored him with the same look she’d shoot him when they were teenagers climbing trees and running loose in fields.

Teddy got his coat and hat. 

Any time spent with his wife and family was to be treasured.


End file.
